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Upon my return to Reed at the start of this semester, I met up with a friend of mine who had just returned from studying abroad. Amidst the excitement of being in the same country again and the desire to know as much as I could about all that she had experienced, I naïvely asked her, “How was it?”

“I could never describe everything that happened accurately,” she responded, “so much took place during my time away that it would takes at least as long for me to relate it all to you.”

Having just left my winter shadow with Shula Neuman and the newsroom at Saint Louis Public Radio, this answer resonated with me. It described exactly what I had felt. Because in the three all-too-short weeks I spent at the station, the team there exceeded every expectation I could have brought with me. But how can I adequately encapsulate that in a short blog post? How can I do justice to every minute of every day, whether I spent it hopping around press conferences with Missouri’s governor, performing investigative journalism about the merits of Stan Kroenke’s proposal to move the Rams back to Los Angeles, or producing interviews with some of the most determined advocates for progress in race relations I have ever met?

Irene Globus-Harris, sophomore physics major and recipient of the Winter Fellowship for International Travel, reflects on her time in Dwingeloo, the Netherlands, at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.

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The Dutch national color is orange. Bright orange, the type that hurts your eyes after staring at it too long. As I flew in at the break of dawn, the entire sky—awash in an intense, orange sunrise—seemed to reflect that fact. I spent the first few days visiting my host family and friends in North Holland, then headed to Dwingeloo to begin my work at ASTRON. Dwingeloo is small—more of a village than a town, and is adjacent to one of the Netherlands’ largest national parks, the Dwingelderveld. ASTRON itself sits within that national park which made the bike ride in exceptionally beautiful.